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Regular readers of Gluten Free in Boulder will recognize that we previewed Blooming Beets last year, before they opened, and we have since eaten there several times, and their food is fantastic! It is the place to go if you are gluten-free, or vegan or both, even if you aren’t [...] Read more »

When searching for new gluten-free eating opportunities in and around Boulder, we take a special satisfaction in finding GF options in surprising places, and a restaurant specifically dedicated to pasta certainly counts as a surprising place. It was therefore with pleasure and excitement that we learned of Twisted Noodle in Longmont, a pasta-centric restaurant with plenty of gluten-free options. Fittingly, these options include gluten-free pasta dishes, but there is also gluten-free bread and garlic bread, as well a gluten-free soup and dessert. The restaurant has actually been open since last September, but our first chance to visit came last week, and we are happy to report that Twisted Noodle is both delicious and economical.

Boulder has a lot of coffee shops, and it is hard to distinguish yourself in an environment in which seemingly every block has a place that sells coffee, and good coffee at that. One way to stand out, though, is to make your own food, and this is what Brewing Market has done with the introduction of their new hummus and falafel wraps. This wouldn’t necessarily be of note to us but for the fact that one of these wraps is gluten-free; and, as an added bonus, the one wrap that is gluten-free also happens to be vegan. So, in addition to good coffee and a broad variety of teas, including a great hand-brewed chai, you can now get gluten-free and vegan wraps when you stop by Brewing Market.

For a great deal of people, ourselves included, cutting up vegetables is by far the most cumbersome part of cooking, and this is especially true if you are preparing breakfast early in the morning. A new product, Farm to Skillet, aims to lighten the burden by offering pre-cut vegetables that are flash frozen and packaged in 10-ounce bags, which can be easily cooked and incorporated into any dish that calls for a vegetable medley. Farm to Skillet offers two types of vegetable combinations – the Rocky Mountain Skillet and the Southwest Skillet – both of which are entirely gluten-free, vegan, and organic. They are now available at four Boulder locations and a number of other stores across Colorado.

With great pleasure we recently learned that Boulder has a Greek restaurant, Volta, that serves a number of gluten-free and vegetarian dishes. Indeed, almost everything at Volta can be made GF, and the vegetarian dishes are abundant and easy to discern on the menu. The restaurant has actually been open for over a year, but we only recently found out about it and wanted to share our discovery with our readers. We have also been in contact with a server at the restaurant who gave us some details about the gluten-free and vegetarian options, and these will be helpful to keep in mind if you decide to visit Volta.

Most people who eat gluten-free know that cheese is gluten-free (at least in most cases). When you have a dietary restriction, you tend to become aware of the full range of foods that are possible to consume. You are constantly reminded of what you can’t eat, and so naturally you quickly turn to, and embrace, foods that you can eat. This presents certain problems for people who have to eat gluten-free, but also want to stick to a vegetarian or vegan diet. The gluten-free diet is in some ways hostile to vegetarianism and veganism because meat and dairy products are two major food groups that are reliably gluten-free. If you want to be a vegetarian or vegan, but find this difficult because of the limitations already imposed on you by the gluten-free diet, you can take some comfort in the existence of places like Gita Nagari Farm, which makes cheese in about the most humane way possible. They basically treat their cows like family pets, and cows live out their entire lives on the farm and are never sent to slaughter.

If it were ever the case that a food item would be forever wiped from the face of the earth, and we could select one item that could be protected against elimination, we would probably choose sandwiches (or in our case gluten-free sandwiches). Sandwiches are almost infinitely variable and are appropriate for nearly any occasion, so despite the large number of sandwich shops in Boulder – despite the number of good sandwich shops in Boulder, ones that have plenty of gluten-free options – we were still delighted to learn of the imminent opening of Organic Sandwich Company in Boulder. The menu looks amazing, the location is superb, and there are plenty of gluten-free options.